New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Castlevania: Resurrection, cancelled in March of 2000, was intended to be the seventeenth title in the Castlevania series for the short lived Sega Dreamcast console. This would also be the third Castlevania game, at the time, to enter the 3D realm. The game was to focus on Sonia Belmont and Victor Belmont, an 1800s vampire killer who had abandoned his lineage, in 1666, directly before Simon Belmont’s mission in the original Castlevania.

Greg Orduyan, the art director for the game, is so far the only staff member on the project to speak of how it would have worked out. Its cancellation is credited to many things, including disagreements between the Japanese and American Konami teams, and the death of the Dreamcast. It is rumored that Castlevania: Curse of Darkness uses some environments that were originally in this game. A beta copy was offered for sale for 3,000 Euros sometime around 2003 but then disappeared.

Thanks to DreamMare we have some more details about this lost project:

According to Jason Lee Elliott (environment artist of the game) the team of CV: Resurrection was the same of Bottom of the Ninth 99:

“Castlevania Resurrection was a game doomed from the start. When Konami first moved to San Francisco, this was one of the first projects started at the studio. I spent most of a year working on Bottom of the 9th 99 and this game was still in the early stages of pre-production. When I switched over to work on Spawn, the studio let go most of the team working on Castlevania and replaced it with the Bot9 team. A year later when I wrapped up Spawn and had taken a month long vacation I was brought onto the team and there had been much more advancement.

The team itself had a lot of troubles when I came on board. Most of the team had only ever worked on sports games so they had no idea how to make a 3D action platformer. The art team wasn’t very cohesive and couldn’t agree on a direction. The game had been in development for almost two years and had little to show. Personally, I discovered that my 3d skills had stagnated from lack of use and I was struggling to hit the quality the others were achieving. I had been at the office almost everyday for almost 3 years at this point and was suffering from severe burn out which didn’t help.

After only a few months on this team I decided I had to quit. I wasn’t having fun making games and I missed Canada. In my resignation letter I stated I would never work in games again. Just goes to show that young people in their 20’s really don’t know anything. A few months after leaving, the game was cancelled and entire studio was closed down.”

The Art Director as we know is Greg Orduyan. The Director of the game was Norio Takemoto. The CGI Director was Jenny Ryu (AKA Jenny Chang): thanks to fans of the time they discovered her digital portfolio and they put it on WayBackMachine:

“This is the Konami game project that was my introduction into the game industry. I met many talented artists there. We worked very hard and did great work to make the game. However, Dreamcast was going out of business. So finally this wonderful game got canceled. It was so sad but I know that these things happen in this industry”

It seems Jenny had to make a CGI model for Resurrection’s protagonist twice: one for the “Green Sonia” and another for “White Sonia”.

The Most well-known person on the team is probably Mark Lindsey, who created music for the game. According to Greg Orduyan of Castlevania Dungeon some presumed Castlevania Resurrection songs leaked online were just on the same CD but were not really meant for the game.

Also Capt. Gravestone put to together a great “Collector’s Guide” for Castlevania Resurrection with information, previews, details on the story, you can download it in PDF from here (5 MB).

Thanks to Celine for some of these screens! And Ryo Suzuki for the magazine scan.

Images:

Videos:

Castlevania Resurrection: Intro